It’s the last one I ask every guest before we finish our timing chatting.

Why?

Not, “Why did you become a photographer?” Not, “Why this project?”

Just...

Why?

Why do you do this, in essence?

After hundreds of interviews, you’d think I’d have become used to the answers. Instead, it’s the question I look forward to most because I never know where it’s going to take us.

Some people answer in seconds. I’m really not sure I could, and so I’m a mixture of enthused, awed, and truly impressed if they can.

Other guests pause, for a while as it goes, leaving me wondering whether I should edit that space down slightly before it ‘goes to press’.

Occasionally someone laughs.

“I’ve never been asked that before.”

That somewhat surprises me. We spend so much time talking about cameras, lenses, books, exhibitions, technique and careers that the reason behind all of it somehow gets left sitting in the corner, lonely.

I’ve heard answers that talk of childhood, curiosity, grief, about proving someone wrong, escaping difficult jobs, preserving family history, or slowing down.

“Oh, I don’t think I can imagine doing anything else with my life,” is often mooted.

Not one answer has been the same.

And that’s made me realise something; perhaps “why” is the most interesting question I, or by extension, we, can ask any creative person.

So I’m planning an episode built entirely around that one small word.

Why.

Why do you do this thing called photography? Or writing? Or sketching? Or making music? Or keeping a journal? Or any other creative pursuit that somehow became part of your life.

Maybe your answer is wrapped up in one moment you can remember with perfect clarity. Maybe it’s been changing for years without you even noticing.

Long replies, short replies, they’re all welcome.

If there’s a story behind your reason, I’d especially love to hear it. I’ll be recording this coming weekend.

Email stories@photowalk.show.

For a long time, I’ve wanted to create something that sits alongside The Photowalk. Not another podcast episode, not a social media post destined to disappear into the scroll, but something slower. Something that can be held, revisited, left on a coffee table, tucked into a camera bag, or discovered again months later.

REFLECTIONS is the result, available as a printed zine and digital PDF with audiobook.

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In this first edition, I travel to Dhaka, Bangladesh, one of the world's largest and most densely populated cities. I found myself thinking about work, resilience, dignity and the role photography can play in helping us understand lives very different from our own. The piece studies the importance of the informal market in a city that's grown beyond its imagined infrastructure. I came away with a great sense of privilege of being invited, however briefly, into other people's worlds.

In the smelter’s yard. Pic: Neale James

There’s also a return to the archive through a conversation with Joel Meyerowitz. His words about the creative spirit have stayed with me ever since we first spoke, particularly his thoughts about paying attention to the everyday. In a photographic culture often drawn towards the spectacular, Joel remains one of the great advocates for noticing what is already in front of us.

ORDER THE DIGITAL AND PRINT VERSIONS HERE

Closer to home, photographer Paul Hornsby takes a camera to Greenham Common in Berkshire and sees a landscape familiar to many listeners through entirely different eyes. Working in infrared, he transforms a place many of us know through the photowalks taken there to record this show, into something otherworldly, reminding us that photography is often less about finding new locations than finding new ways to look.

Greenham Common’s Control Tower. Pic: Paul Hornsby

I’ve also included a selection of photographs from my own photowalks, accompanied by reflections on the connection between photography, movement, wellbeing and attention. Much of The Photowalk has always been rooted in the simple idea that walking with a camera encourages us to notice more. Not just visually, but emotionally too. The photographs become markers along the way, reminders of where we’ve been and how we felt when we were there.

REFLECTIONS isn’t intended to be a gear magazine or a collection of technical articles. It’s closer to a notebook of journeys, conversations, observations and photographs. A place for stories that don’t always fit naturally into a podcast episode.

The first print volume runs to 48 pages (including cover) and is printed on uncoated paper with a traditional staple binding. The print edition is limited to 100 copies.

It’s also available as a digital PDF with an accompanying downloadable audiobook.

Most importantly, every copy helps support the continued production of The Photowalk, allowing me to keep making the programme, sharing stories and walking with a camera in hand.

ORDER THE DIGITAL AND PRINT VERSIONS HERE

This is part one of a two-parter that is appearing on my new channel, HALFWAY TO MAYBE.

“You take that bloody box of letters out of my house and don’t ever mention his name again,” barked my father, surprisingly angry about what was essentially a shoebox of scrawl from Ronnie Kray, the infamous East London gangster.

I was somewhat confused and taken aback at that moment, because this was a box of writings I thought he might be interested in, for what was written and how it was written, these almost childlike pencil scratches on prison-headed paper.

Pic: Aswin Deth

Dad talked about London from the war years onwards a reasonable amount, so I thought at the very least my special shoebox of handwritten letters from one of the city’s most notorious gangsters might pique his interest, over this unexpected fury.

It was 1986, and the notorious Ronnie Kray, brother to Reggie, had been serving time at Her Majesty’s pleasure for seventeen years, two less than I’d been alive, and seven of the latter in a maximum secure hospital called Broadmoor, having been certified insane.

I should fill you in, as the Krays probably said to a few hapless victims of their violence, as to why letters ending with “from your friend Ronnie” were causing such concern for my dad. But this story, this memory, has come to mind for three reasons, really.

One of my first employees, during the short moments I’ve felt grown up enough to actually hire people, was someone called Emma. We worked together in a business called The Radio School, training tomorrow’s broadcast talent to understand the process of applying for work in an industry which leaned on large helpings of right-place-right-time luck, sprinklings of nepotism, self-confidence and a stark inability to read the words “we have nothing right now but will keep your letter on file in case the right opportunity comes along” as a terminal rendition of “thanks but no thanks.”

To me, Emma has always been known as Prim, as in prim and proper. There’s no steering the Bentley away from this, but she is, I would say, my poshest friend, always so elegantly turned out, even in dog walker scruffs, lives in that house Blur sang about, and she’s exceptionally well spoken with friends who have names like Otilie, Hugo, Clementine and Rupert.

LISTEN TO PART 2

She’s writing a novel at the moment, as it goes, and last week, on a catch-up dog walk, I was permitted to read the opening chapter, before the publisher has even turned a page.

It’s bloody good work and actually, I feel privileged to be featured in this book, based on real-ish events, as a character named Jamie. There’s a particular brevity to my appearance, a Halfway to Maybe man would have it no other way, and I’m written out by chapter two.

The storyline is mostly about the employers that come after, who are a little bit wide boy, a little bit ooh, and a little bit ahh. You need to read that in an EastEnders cockney timbre.

I’m not suggesting for a moment that they are or were a Kray kind of set-up, but the stories and colourful language of this novel could take the pearls clean off a duchess, and my friend Prim walked right into that world with a firm handshake and no idea of what “Sort it aht, Bird, or I’ll give you some Adrian” actually meant.

Secondly, I’ve been editing an in-vision interview with a photographer called John Swannell, a British portrait and fashion photographer, famous for photographing members of the royal family, including Diana, Princess of Wales and the late Queen Elizabeth II. He started out assisting at Vogue and for David Bailey before building his own client list of the rich and very famous.

We’ve arrived at the part in the edit where he recounts meeting the Krays at Bailey’s studio. I’ll save the details for the film, but in essence, John remembers escaping through a window in a building where they were working, to save himself from the advances of one Ronnie Kray.

The stars are clearly aligning, because, and this is the third reason behind the piece, my eldest Jack asked me over the weekend who the Krays were. Oddly, with all this happening, YouTube (tell me it’s not snooping in an omnipotent fashion) started serving up clips from the film Legend, which tells the story of the twin brothers Ronnie and Reggie Kray, who ran organised crime across the East End of London through the 1950s and ‘60s with a combination of charm, community loyalty, and a capacity for extreme violence that made them almost impossible to challenge.

They were celebrities as much as criminals, photographed with politicians and pop stars, welcomed into nightclubs they probably half-owned anyway, loved, loathed and feared in equal measure.

People of a particular generation would suggest they looked after London in a fashion akin to a kind of Robin Hood figure, that old people could leave their doors unlocked, that nobody nicked from their own, and that there was a code of sorts, however brutal the hands that enforced it.

Reggie was the more calculated of the two, the one who could read a room and knew when to turn the menace up or down. Ronnie was a different matter entirely. He was diagnosed as paranoid schizophrenic, which his solicitors would later lean on heavily, but the clinical label doesn’t quite capture what made him so genuinely frightening. He didn’t lose his temper — that would almost have been reassuring.

No, Ronnie was cold, unpredictable in a way that had nothing to do with drink or provocation, and he seemed to enjoy the fear he generated as much as anything else.

LISTEN TO PART 2

One moment he’d be saying something quite amusing, the next he’d be caving the side of your head in with a claw hammer.

People around him never quite knew which version they were getting, and that uncertainty was, for a very long time, what kept everyone in line.

Even when the Krays were banged up, as they say, you’d have found, as I did, that mum and dad’s generation still felt awkward at the very mention of either of the brothers, as if just the mere use of their surname could somehow magic them back. They were, I suppose, the Voldemort of their time.

So, this box. A shoebox of letters from Ronnie Kray.

Aged 19, I worked as a DJ for a while at a club in Waltham Abbey, a part of London. Actually, it’s more a part of Essex, but it’s one of those places that feels like it wants to lay claim more to being allied to the smoke than a leafier part of the south east.

This was a small nightclub tucked into a corner of an estate of tower block flats. Dark red brick buildings, as I remember. Very much a part of 1960s soulless architecture, but not characterful enough to be granted brutalist status.

It was leased by a man called John, a short, dark-haired, chain-smoking man with a gruff voice and disarming demeanour, and try as I might, using all the powers of search, AI and otherwise, I have not been able to trace this club, him, or indeed the tower blocks it was part of. I suspect they’re long gone, and whilst the 1980s seem only a short time ago, I think they were possibly knocked down twenty-five-plus years ago.

The club was on the ground floor, reached by steps leading down from a snooker club. I’d answered a small 3x1 ad in a local newspaper: “Wanted: DJ for weekends, residency position. Auditions being held. Apply to 01 something something etc etc.”

Funny to think ads only had call for the space needed to contain a telephone number.

I rang, having only DJ’d with a makeshift disco unit made from a mahogany sideboard since the age of 16 or 17, for friends’ parties and a pub in Hertford that I wasn’t old enough to order a beer in.

“Come in Saturday afternoon,” said the voice on the end of the phone.

Do you remember how we used to find places before sat nav? This club was properly hidden away in the middle of a very depressed-looking area, and the only place to park was out the back in an alleyway that by day was scary enough, I could only imagine what it might be like at kicking out time when darkness enveloped the space. I arrived thirty minutes late, after searching for the place, figuring out the parking and then working a route back through the estate to the front door.

“You’re an hour late,” grumbled a man who unbolted the door to let me in.

I went to answer that it was only thirty minutes, but he turned the moment I started to talk and motioned me to follow him.

The club’s brutally harsh fluorescent lighting stripped every bit of mystery from the room. Spaces like this are almost unrecognisable from what they become after dark, all the illusion gone, just sticky carpet and the ghosts of a thousand Saturday nights.

I’d been DJing in pubs on and off for a couple of years by that point, so I knew the smell well enough: every known tobacco brand had worked itself into the soft furnishings like it had barbs, and underneath all of it something sweeter and harder to name, cheap aftershave or perfume, probably. Stale lager had soaked into the red and white striped carpet; it had lost all its bounce, and the walls looked like they’d last seen a paintbrush a decade back, easily. There were booths (another tone of red) that looked like areas prying eyes wouldn’t be able to peer into easily, and a DJ unit cloaked in that puffy, studded black leather.

Standing waiting were two men: John, the owner, and another man, similar height, a bit stockier, suit-clad with no tie, in his 50s, possibly 60s, sporting a long scar that ran from just next to his right eye down his face to his chin. It was an old scar, but I could see the depth, or at least, in some sense, feel it. When, as a photographer, I describe a face as lived-in or storied, this is what I mean. He looked like he’d been twelve rounds with life and was ready to do another twelve just for the sh*ts and giggles.

I felt like I’d walked onto a film set.

The owner greeted me first.

“I’m John, you’re late. But I still have a slot, that’s if you’re any good. This is my head of door. You might need him from time to time, that’s if you’re any good.”

I shook John’s hand. Then I shook the other man’s hand.

He squeezed mine back and held the grip uncomfortably long. He smiled, that confident, menacing smile that only a man with a long scar on his face and what looked like a cauliflower ear on the opposing side of his head could muster.

“Hello,” he said, with a deep, resonant 50-a-day London/Essex accent, the sort of tone that also suggested he ate razor blades for breakfast.

“I think you and I are gonna get on just fine.”

“If he’s good enough,” John chirped in.

“Nah, he’ll be alright. I’m gonna look after you,” he said, or threatened. I couldn’t quite work out which.

“I’m Neale,” I mumbled. “You are?”

“Scarface,” said the man. “That’s what you can call me. Scarface.”

To be continued on HALFWAY TO MAYBE, on Wednesday.

India is the world’s largest democracy, with a space programme, a film industry that dwarfs Hollywood, and somewhere in excess of twenty official languages. It’s not a country, so much as a civilisation, that just happens to have a border around it.

It’s the second year the show has effectively gone on the road to India, and with Lynn Fraser, my adventuring partner in The Journey Beyond, a travel company for those with a curious eye, this year we ventured to Kolkata and Varanasi.

You wouldn’t expect me to travel without my microphones, it’s a walk on a grander scale than usual after all. So, in this special episode of the Photowalk Podcast, I walk and talk with eight photographers: Anne, Bill, Fraser, Lloyd, Mercedes, Nicola, Owen and Peter, along with Lynn, and our Indian guides and mentors Shivam, Shubh, Mohit and Arvind, visiting two cities that could not be more different from each other, and yet unmistakably, overwhelmingly Indian.

KOLKATA

Formerly Calcutta, renamed in 2001 to better reflect its Bengali pronunciation, Kolkata was, for a long stretch of British rule, the capital of India. It was a place of much wealth, living cheek by jowl with poverty, a co-existence, a street apart. It’s a city of literature, music, and politics, home to more Nobel laureates than most countries, and, without a doubt, has its own rhythm, feel, and sheer energy, the latter in abundance. Photographically, it is a dreamscape of opportunity.

The Mullick Ghat flower market sits right beneath the Howrah Bridge on the banks of the Hooghly River, one of the biggest flower markets in Asia. The ghat was built in 1855, and flowers have been traded here for over 130 years. Buyers arrive early, 4am onwards, although to my eyes it feels more like a 24-hour operation than a market with opening hours, with sleeping areas tucked among the stalls to keep things turning over even when no buying is happening.

Temple owners buy flowers to sell to pilgrims; pilgrims buy them to offer to temples; street sellers buy them to attach to taxis for safe travel; and hotels buy them for their lobbies. Almost every flower in Kolkata most probably passed through this market at some point. For a photographer, it’s a gift. The smell alone stops you in your tracks. The floors are muddy and in places slippery, vendors and buyers shout across each other, and there's a part of you that wants to step back from the noise and find a quieter corner, except you don't, because you know you're standing in the middle of something worth staying in, and pointing your camera at.

The Howrah Bridge (above) was commissioned in 1943, carries around 100,000 vehicles and over 150,000 pedestrians every day, and was built without a single nut or bolt; the whole thing is held together with rivets. It replaced an earlier pontoon bridge whose middle section would physically detach to let boats through, with the times published in the newspapers so people could plan around it.

Behind the flower market is the Siyaram Akhara, one of the last surviving traditional wrestling schools in the city. The wrestlers train in a clay pit, the clay dug from the Hooghly itself and mixed with Ayurvedic oils, turmeric, salt and neem. The akhara was founded by a man who once trained the legendary wrestler Dara Singh, and the current trainer, a third-generation pehlwan (traditional Indian wrestler), has won eighteen gold medals in state championships, but interestingly has never charged a single rupee for teaching.

Then there are the trains. Oh, the trains! Doors open, people hanging off the sides, the whole city moving through them like blood through veins, if you’ll pardon the expression. Kolkata wears its colonial history and its independence with equal complexity, and often both are visible at once from the open window and the doors of a carriage.

It’s people-watching on a grand scale, though, interestingly, you’re left pretty much to your own devices when it comes to documenting the scene through a lens. Very few passengers turn from you, though I often make eye contact to seek approval.

For the purists, this may not seem candid enough, but in confined places where an open door would be an easy way to eject a bombastic “I know my rights, you can’t stop me” self-styled ‘tell it like it is’ photographer, there are, I believe, privileges afforded a street-shooter who applies themself to informal courtesies.

VARANASI

Varanasi, also called Kashi, or Benares, is among the oldest continuously inhabited cities in the world, with archaeological evidence of habitation dating back to 1800 BCE. Mark Twain visited in 1897 and wrote that Benares is older than history, older than tradition, older even than legend. You feel that. The city has been here so long that the concept of it being ancient barely covers the narrative.

According to Hindu tradition, Varanasi is the eternal city of Shiva, and the name Kashi means brightness, the city of light. It sits entirely on the west bank of the Ganges, which matters: the west is the side of the setting sun, associated with death, while the city faces east toward the rising sun and rebirth. That duality is everywhere. It’s not subtle and is an immediate lesson to all visitors.

Start anywhere near the ghats, and someone will hand you a small clay cup of chai. Kullhad chai, tea served in fired clay cups, is a thread that connects people from every walk of life in Varanasi. You drink it, you toss the cup into a large bin, some even break it in what feels like a form of tradition, and then move on.

It’s a democratic ritual shared by people of all riches, backgrounds, and cultures. I’m still to grasp this idea of a tiny cup of tea being sufficient, coming from a place where a brew means the largest mug I can find in the cupboard and cupping my hands around the thing like it’s central heating. I’d often ask for two or three refills, which bemused those serving.

The stretch of riverbank that matters runs about four kilometres, lined with 88 ghats; stone steps descending to the water, each with its own history. Shrines, temples, and palaces rise tier on tier from the water’s edge. Some ghats are for bathing, some for laundry, some for prayer. Two of them, Manikarnika and Harishchandra, are burning ghats, where cremations take place around the clock, every day of the year.

Hindus believe that dying in Varanasi grants moksha, liberation from the cycle of rebirth, so people come here specifically to die. The fires at Manikarnika have reportedly been burning for thousands of years. You can see the smoke from the river. You can smell the sandalwood. There is no way to be prepared for it, and there is no way to be unaffected by it either.

We spent time there with our group as photographers, which raises questions of its own: what do you photograph, what do you not, where is the line between bearing witness and intrusion? They are not easy questions, and we talked about them at length within the show.

HAVE MICROPHONE, WILL TRAVEL

This particular India episode is one of the most personal things I’ve made. But it also reflects what the Photowalk Podcast is really about: a spirit of adventure and curiosity, taking photographers to places that genuinely challenge and change them.

India doesn’t let you stay comfortable, and it doesn’t let you stay distant. It got to all of us, as I think you’ll hear in the show. The episode is out now, and this is my invitation to travel with us vicariously in the podcastsphere.

The Photowalk podcast is available wherever you get your podcasts, and the show page carries photographs made during that time.

LEARN MORE about our photo travels by going to The Journey Beyond.

The scene stopped me. It looked like he was wearing a mask of light. I raised the X100V, my trusty travelling companion, and made the picture before I'd really thought about it, certain he was about to move, only he didn't. He was just standing there, and it occurred to me that he wasn't posing or waiting for someone. He was feeling the sun.

The reality is that he's been blind since 2011. Cataracts, caused by pressure on the eyes, treatable, in the right circumstances, with the right access. But the healthcare system hadn't reached him, and so the light that was painting such a beautiful line across his face was also the only way he had left of experiencing it.

I've made pictures I'm technically prouder of. But what started as a composition became something else entirely once I understood what I was actually looking at.

#streetportrait #documentaryphotography #humanstories

So we come to this picture we’re both deliberating over, and I’m thinking to myself, “Ah, you nailed that Lynn, and I was just that smidgen off,” and I’ll explain why.

Often, when you travel together with another photographer, you’re bound to make pictures that have drawn you both to a scene for a myriad of reasons, and this was one such moment.

It was 5pm-ish and we were in a part of Dhaka where rickshaw drivers go to rest and hang out, many seizing the opportunity to take a well-earned snooze. We happened across this chap, and it chimed loudly for us both, clearly. And so we set about the scene, both deciding without consultation that we would slow the shutter down to accentuate the movement around the sleeping driver. The world keeps moving as he decides to rest. My photograph is above, and Lynn’s alternative view is below.

Notwithstanding my punchy reds (Lynn’s is a fairer colour response), it’s fascinating to record the differences between our two photographs.

My photograph

This picture (top) is made with a Fujifilm X100V at 35mm equivalent, and I’m reasonably close, handheld at 1/15, ISO1250, f/8. Handholding this camera, which has no image stabilisation at this shutter speed, with a reasonably steady hand is not particularly challenging. I positioned myself on a fairly similar plane to him, thinking it would feel quite intimate with my proximity, and waited for traffic or people to pass. Squeezing the shutter button, I captured my image, revealing a lot of ‘sky’, using that word as a catch-all phrase for background with height.

Lynn’s take

This photograph (below mine) is made with a Canon R5 with the RF24-70 f/2.8 at 52mm. Lynn chose to stand back from my viewpoint, leaning against a wall for support as she’d raised the camera to make this image. This gave her a further anchor, as the system is that much heavier than the Fuji. Lynn’s image is shot at f/13, 1/6, ISO100. The settings are wildly different from those I chose when making the photograph, and it works beautifully with the two walkers passing by the rickshaw, rather than with my low-lying, fast-moving traffic across the road. The camera being raised loses that ‘sky,’ in this case, the white building.

What we’re left with is far less distraction from that white behemoth across the way, characters that are easier to make out than the ghostly ‘whip’ of my vehicles and certainly more context in that you can see more of the rickshaw the driver is resting in. Your eyes go to the driver comfortably, and it feels, to me, a far more rounded environmental portrait.

In summary

Nobody picks up a camera and sees the world the same way as the person standing next to them, and that's not a flaw in the process, it's the whole point of it, and I believe there's something genuinely fascinating about deconstructing two images made from almost identical positions and asking why they feel like they came from completely different photographic conversations.

My mate from the FujiCast podcast, Kev Mullins, and I were talking about social media of late and what he does and doesn’t like in terms of SM consumption, and TikTok was top of his ‘against the wall come the revolution’ list.

“I can literally see brains coming out their ears,” he complained, as if this is something that afflicts only the young, but he knows, I know, that this is a common thread now, which but less than a generation ago, did not even exist. I don’t want to get all ‘drama darling’ about it, but could this be the pandemic nobody really thinks of as.

Pic: Markus Spiske

I drilled down into the doom-scrolling habit and revealed some stats:

Teenagers often scroll late at night. Content leans toward comparison. Looks, bodies, popularity, success. Confidence can be a casualty, as can sleep.

Young adults (20s) scroll between tasks. Feeds mix news, careers, lifestyles. Pressure to be “doing better” creeps in, with a side serving of anxiety, which is hard to switch off, of course.

Adults (30s–40s). To this age range, scrolling, they say, feels a touch practical, but no less addictive. News, parenting, money, work. Bad headlines stack up fast in these scrolls, and stress is normalised.

Midlife (50s–60s). You see, us lot have reframed this doom-scrolling thing as ‘staying informed’. Our eldest, Jack is the first to scoff at me for this excuse. Politics, health stories, world events. Boy, can I go off on one about what’s in the news and who’s done what to whom.

Older adults (70+). This is where Facebook dominates, along with local news and community groups. This is the group most likely to believe and spread false information, which travels fast.

The common thread; different ages, same-ish pull. The brain reacts to threat and novelty.

Scrolling oddly gives you the feeling you’re in charge, which I recoiled at when reading, but you know what, it’s bloody true.

Monday night, the man who keeps me from climbing walls and repeating Shakespeare sonnets backwards, Neil Ford, an IT superhero in plain clothing, came across to just go through stuff, and let me level with you here, check that I haven’t been changing settings on the sly. He knows, you know, I swear in the same way a shark can smell one part of blood in a million parts of water, he can smell that I have unclicked something on a dropdown I shouldn’t have. I know sharks don’t technically smell blood, but let me have that one, will ya?

Anyway, he came bearing a gift. A book about bullet journaling, with one of the dotted notepads that you use to do said bullet journaling.

He didn’t say it as much, or perhaps he did, but he was certainly loudly intimating that using your phone or any electronic connected thing, can often draw you from the task in hand. I mean, if you grab your phone to make a note, what’s to stop you from thinking, “I wonder what comments I may have had on Insta,” or “I wonder if there are any dogs being reunited on YouTube while I’m here.”

Perhaps he was suggesting too, that my reliance on doing everything on a phone or laptop, i.e. lists and journaling of life, too, is not always the cleanest way to be productive because of the distraction possibilities.

I did think at first, “Well, that might work for you, but for me, it’s just another thing I need to think of in terms of making notes in… you’ve just handed me, albeit pen and paper lead, another attention sponge.”

But then I did a little reading over the last day or so and came up with some thoughts on how our screens have rewired our brains. And moreover, whether we can do anything about it.

My main weakness with social media is YouTube.

I seem incapable of a simple search about a leaky drainpipe. Before I even type a single word into the search bar, a thumbnail catches my eye, a conspiracy theory (I’m not even a theorist), politics, yes, bloomin’ politics, whether my team might win the league, aircraft landing on carriers, look, I’ll open it now, and I promise you I’ll not click on a film. Here’s the list that comes up, standby. These are the titles that show first.

How to get your kicks working in a DIY shop. It looks like comedy, I think it is, I’m not clicking on it.

The most intense day of my photography career. I’m alright; it’s too clickbaity, though I like the creator… the DIY shop is still the one I’d have gone for.

Then the shorts: there’s one about a climber panicking on a free climb. He’s the world’s best climber, so I think I may have clicked this only to find out how he succeeded in the end. The only five exercises you need to get jacked. Nuff said, I don’t feel I need to go there, because I certainly do not look like the guy in the thumbnail. But he just may have the secret right? There’s a dog being reunited with his owner after five years. This is getting harder. Have I made my point?

With YT, I click and really, twenty minutes evaporate. I close the app and wonder what I was looking for in the first place.

If this feels familiar, you’re not alone. And according to Ryder Carroll, the designer who created the Bullet Journal Method, this isn’t a personal failing; it’s by design.

The Deliberate Architecture of Distraction.

Ryder Carroll, who spent years struggling with attention difficulties before developing his analogue productivity system, has become one of the most articulate voices on how our digital devices are eroding our capacity for focus. In his book The Bullet Journal Method, he describes our smartphones and apps as “weapons of mass distraction,” engineered with extraordinary precision to capture and monetise our attention.

The mechanics are simple but devastating. Every app on your phone has been optimised through thousands of tests (whoever they are), refined by behavioural psychologists, and tuned by machine-learning algorithms with one goal: to keep you engaged. Not informed, certainly productive, not happy, just engaged.

Because engagement, measured in minutes and hours, translates directly into advertising revenue. No wotsit Sherlock.

YouTube’s autoplay feature, which queues up the next video before you’ve finished the current one, wasn’t created for your convenience. It was created because YouTube’s engineers discovered that removing the choice, what they call choice friction, that moment where you might decide to close the app, resulted in dramatically longer viewing sessions.

The algorithm learns what keeps you specifically watching, building an ever-more-accurate model of your likes and, let’s call it weaknesses. Dogs being reunited, chief among mine.

But why does it work so effectively? The answer lies in how these platforms exploit our brain’s reward circuitry. Every time you pull down to refresh your social media feed, you’re engaging in what behavioural psychologists call a “variable reward schedule,” the same mechanism that makes slot machines so addictive.

You don’t know what you’ll find when you refresh. Maybe nothing. Maybe something mildly interesting. Maybe something that triggers a dopamine spike, a like on your post, a message from someone you care about, a piece of outrageous news. This unpredictability is crucial. If rewards were predictable, we’d lose interest.

Ryder Carroll noticed that we developed what he calls “rapid cognitive shifting”—the habit of jumping from stimulus to stimulus without ever going deep. There’s always something new, something now, something urgent-seeming but ultimately trivial. The infinite scroll means there’s no natural stopping point, no sense of completion. You can never reach the end of TikTok or Instagram or Twitter, sorry I refuse to call it X.

To use my favourite TV detective Columbo, there’s always, “One more post, one more video, one more thing to check. Bring me a bowl of chilli, will ya?”

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Traditional media had natural boundaries; the newspaper had a last page, a TV show had an ending, and you couldn’t binge-watch on day one, and a magazine could be finished. You could stop consuming, and actually, it wasn’t even your choice.

“What do you mean I’ve got to wait until next week to find out what happened in Call the Midwife?”

When we’re constantly interrupted, constantly pulled toward whatever flashing light demands our attention, we lose the capacity for self-reflection, Ryder’s words there. We become, in his words, “strangers to ourselves.”

If I were a dog now, like one of the ones in the dog reuniting shorts, I would be running around in circles chasing my tail in excitement, because even though I knew this stuff, I don’t think I ever really knew it, if that makes sense.

The Bullet Journal Method emerged from Ryder Carroll’s personal struggle with this fragmentation. As someone with ADHD, he found that digital tools, far from helping him organise his thoughts, made his attention problems worse. The constant notifications, the switching between apps, the infinite possibility of distraction, all of it created cognitive chaos.

So his solution was radically analogue: a paper notebook with a simple system for tracking tasks, events, and notes. Writing by hand is slower than typing. Turning pages is slower than swiping. This friction, the word now being used more positively at this stage, became the real feature.

I often talk about photography slowing me down and creating space for thought, and here it is in a journaling form.

Of course, understanding this doesn’t make the pull go away. But it does change the nature of the struggle. It’s not my fault that I opened YouTube for one thing and got lost for twenty minutes. That outcome was engineered by some of the smartest designers and psychologists in the world, backed by billions of dollars in resources. The platform won because it was built to win.

The way forward, as Ryder Carroll suggests, isn’t to fight these systems with willpower alone, because like a doughnut that says ‘eat me,’ willpower is finite, and these systems are relentless. Instead, we need to build new systems, new habits, new environments that work with our brain’s tendencies rather than against them. Your brain didn’t evolve to resist infinite scrolling. But it did evolve to adapt, to learn, to change. The same neuroplasticity that allowed these apps to train you into distraction can train you back toward focus, one intentional choice at a time.

So I have just received this gift from Neil. It could be a gift of time, a gift of concentration, a gift of patience, a gift of… so many things, and I think I’m in. I’m fascinated, that’s for sure.

It’s food for thought while I make a cuppa, and please, even given I’ve just said, would you excuse me for five minutes? I do need to go and watch a film about how to get your kicks working in a DIY shop. And then I promise to bullet journal my experience.

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I often muse on the Photowalk podcast that if there’s something slightly technical I need to engage with or attend to, then it’s very likely to give me a nosebleed, although to suggest I ‘don’t do technical’ is not entirely accurate.

A chap called Neil Ford is my champion of I.T., and I think I have leant on him more and more to do this, because whilst I could do tech, I have chosen not to do tech, mainly because he keeps up with stuff that requires you to read an instruction manual. I’d rather smash the button that I believe is stopping the kit I’m trying to make work as many times as it takes, convinced that it might just do the trick.

Halftime oranges

Come on, let’s be honest, it worked in Star Wars. When the Millennium Falcon refuses to jump to lightspeed, Han Solo gives the controls a thwack, a sharp reminder of who’s in charge, and hey presto, it all works again.

But has technical expertise overshadowed good old-fashioned feelings for the craft of photography?

A question I shall revisit after some thoughts about football, the round ball version.

In my day, as a fledgling player with a full head of hair, football, as I remember it, was not a very technical sport. Even Jimmy Hill on the Saturday night TV footie show Match of the Day would use language like ‘boot the ball up the field a little more’ in his punditry, I’m sure.

As a young something, I played as a defender for Bengeo Tigers. We played in gold and black stripes, in the days before McDonald’s started sponsoring youth football – I’ve never quite understood that stance. Look I like a Big Mac with the best of ‘em, but there’s something quite odd about a fast food chain sponsoring sport and health, and if you dare say to me “Carrots Neale, what about the Carrot sticks,” I shall stare at you long and hard for longer than feels comfortable.

Some associations just don’t feel appropriate to me. That’s just me.

True story, my grandad was a tobacconist and confectioner close-ish to Tottenham Hotspur’s ground in north London, and there was a time in the 70s he’d be the go-to blending tobacconist for the Spurs players who’d buy the tobacco on their way in to the match. See, some associations just don’t feel appropriate to me.

Anyway, back on point, the manager of the Under 13s team I played for, Bengeo Tigers, was, from memory, certainly not technical in the slightest. I don’t recall half-time chats with pitch-side marker boards, or anyone shouting tactics from the sidelines. It was as much as the coaching staff with a very small ‘c’ and ‘s’, could do to stop us running off early, approaching half-time, when the orange segments arrived from my friend Christopher Strong’s mum.

I’m having to borrow from somewhat faded memory here, but coaching followed a more colloquial path; something like “Oi Jamsie, just bang that ball out if it comes anywhere near you, because you’re certainly not skilled enough to do anything else with it. Big Trev, run and see if you can get on the end of anything that comes your way, the irony being Big Trev was actually little Trevor Higgins from my chemistry class at school, someone whose growth spurt hadn’t actually triggered yet, but he was the fastest kid on the sports field, no doubt. And, the rest of you, when that whistle blows, knock it about the pitch and see if you can just get two or three completed passes. Then, when you lot have lost it, Jamesie can kick it out, hopefully.

When we watch football at home, my eldest speaks in a language akin to Hungarian with a Basque accent, in Icelandic.

Apparently, I know diddly squat about football, and I’m constantly tested, so that he might be able to ridicule me, for purposes of self-entertainment.

“Come on Dad, get with it, it’s obvious, they’ve shifted into a 3-2-4-1, with the full-backs inverting to create overloads in the half-spaces, while the false nine drops into the double pivot to destabilise the opposition’s press.”

Right you are son. Or in old money, bang it up the field lads, and run like sh&t to get on the end of it if Big Trev doesn’t get there first.

So yes, football these days has turned into a tech fest. To put it in photographic terms, it’s like being handed a Sony flagship mirrorless and actually knowing what every single button, dial, and menu item does. Impressively technical.

But has technical expertise overshadowed good old-fashioned feelings for the craft of photography?

I do wonder if we’ve confused expertise with expression? They both start with e, but they’re about as relatable to each other as tobacco should be to a Spurs player heading to a match.

The danger with expertise is that it can become a cage, a set of rules so tightly drawn that you dare not colour outside the lines. You know your histogram better than you know your own heartbeat. You recite lens specifications more fluently than you recall why you first picked up a camera.

And yet, when you look at the work of some of the most celebrated photographers, Robert Frank, Nan Goldin, and William Eggleston, it isn’t always the technical perfection that holds you. What strikes you is presence, honesty, timing, eyes open, willing to see.

I think back to the pictures that really stop me. The ones where perhaps the focus is slightly off, or the light doesn’t follow a textbook pattern. They work because they feel alive. Expertise didn’t make them; attentiveness did.

So, is expertise overrated? I’d say it depends on what you’re measuring. Technical prowess is useful. It gives you tools, choices, and control. But it’s not the heart of the matter. A carpenter who knows every type of joint but never builds a chair isn’t much use to anyone. The craft exists to serve the making, not the other way round.

After twenty years of professional photography, do I consider myself an expert? Honestly, no. And I’m not sure I want to. Because if you start to believe you’ve arrived, you stop travelling. You stop questioning, experimenting, failing, and learning. And I don’t think that’s an excuse for my inability to quote tech, no.

Perhaps the better word is practitioner. Someone in practice, still on the pitch, still trying to get a few passes together. Someone who loves the game, whether or not they can name every formation or decode the tactics.

And that’s a comforting thought: to keep showing up, to keep photographing, not as an expert, but as a participant. Someone willing to kick the ball, who may miss, but tries again. Perhaps the most interesting pictures aren’t made by those who know everything, but by those who are still curious enough to admit they don’t.

Half-time oranges, anyone? See Christopher Strong’s mum.

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So where were we?

Ah, yes, our Jack’s driving test. Not necessarily very photographic, these two editions, but I do have something to say about sound, a creative endeavour that should never be underestimated.

In yesterday’s Reflection, I was nursing a pot of tea and a slice of Bakewell, all very British and what we all do when we have moments of high-intensity stress. You’ll find lines of us Brits queuing up for it at these times.

Pic: Jon Tyson

“What can I get you, Sir? The Bakewell? Very well, take a seat.”

”Staff, table three wants a slice of Bakewell. Be as quick as you can, and also be on standby for the recovery position if needed.”

Forty minutes almost to the minute had passed since Jack began his test at exactly 11:58, that odd precision I remarked upon yesterday.

I’d watched from the window in the café next to the test centre. The rain fell steadily and mercilessly. It was raining stair rods, or whatever that expression is, and Jack was out in it, taking his test.

It’s harder to drive in the rain when it’s making small dents in the roof, and road markings get much trickier to pick out with large amounts of surface water forming. A roundabout had been my nemesis on the test I took, being barked at by Mr Burgess, the examiner, and there was a particularly nasty, large four-lane roundabout a quarter mile from the test centre. We’d already clocked how faded some of the arrows seemed to be, and now this.

At this rate, I might need a second slice of Bakewell.

A strange thought occurred too; “I hope the examiner doesn’t get grumpy at the scrapy windscreen wiper on the passenger’s side. Would that be enough to secure failure?”

Imagine driving the test of your life only to find the examiner had some kind of traumatic reaction to a scrapy wiper blade.

The phone rang.

It was Jack.

Now I was expecting either “Dad, I failed” in laconic tones, for which lunch in Nandos as a treat might turn from celebration to consolation, or a big smiley “I did it!”

I was readying myself to hopefully punch the air and be unnecessarily joyous.

“Hi Dad,” said Jack… the seconds felt like minutes, I needed the punchline and I couldn’t tell what was coming by the tone of his voice.

I have spent a life studying tone of voice really. I’m fascinated by voice and sound, what it means, how it can guide your mind to an outcome.

Long before I ever thought seriously about photographs, sound had already taught me how people bear their soul. Microphones don’t just capture words; they catch intent, hesitation, doubt, sentiment and a plethora of other meanings and feelings.

Two people can read the same sentence aloud and turn it into entirely different truths. One version can be gentle, another can feel defensive, angry, even. One feels open, another guarded. You can hear when someone is reciting something they believe, and you can hear when they are hoping the words will convince them after the fact.

It’s why speeches stay with us: not the transcript, but the delivery.

You could read my words, but they won’t be me, or how I want you to receive this. In fact, on services like Substack, you can choose a very good AI voice to deliver pieces, but you’re not listening to the author. And that, I think, makes a huge difference.

Look, let’s not get all conspiratorial about something I want to say to you here, but let me say a name, a name behind one of the most famous short speeches ever made, not on this planet, but from a rock far above our heads, the moon.

Neil Armstrong’s words. Have you listened to them? Have you really listened to them?

Neil’s voice on the Moon was absolutely studied, and still is to this day. Not just for what he said, but for how he said it. The interest wasn’t about rhetoric or performance, it was about human behaviour under pressure.

Neil Armstrong’s transmission on Apollo 11 is often described as calm, almost flat. NASA engineers, psychologists, and later historians paid close attention to that. Not because it sounded heroic, but because it didn’t.

His tone was measured, controlled, technically precise, but wait a minute, before you start to wonder if it didn’t happen, the measure and control weren’t apparently accidental. Neil Armstrong had been selected in part because of how he spoke. He didn’t rush. He didn’t emote unnecessarily.

His voice stayed steady even when his heart rate, which we later learned was significantly elevated. In other words, the voice didn’t mirror the internal state. And that mattered, because Mission Control placed their trust in this man; they needed to know that he could think clearly when it counted, and his voice told them that.

I’ve listened to thousands of voices over the years, 12,000 minutes of wedding speeches when photographing those events, minutes sound so much more impressive than hours or days.

But also, I’ve listened on my radio shows and podcasts to interviewees, callers, contributors, people who didn’t think their voice mattered until someone asked them a question and waited properly for the answer.

Tone carries truth faster than words ever could.

I remember my newspaper days picking up the phone to a man called Hugh; I don’t recall his surname. I do remember what a beautiful voice he had. Friendly, approachable, trustworthy, and it wasn’t an accident. He was a sports journalist, and he reckoned his voice opened doors to places and events long before he ever had to show his face or credentials.

Gatekeepers didn’t stop Hugh from getting through to important people. His voice was resonant and carried weight, yet he wasn’t pompous. He had tone worked out.

Think of how quickly you can recognise someone you love on the phone. Not by what they say, but by the first syllable. Sometimes even before that. A breath. A half-laugh. The way they say your name. Voice holds character, mischief, kindness, authority, weariness.

All of it lives there. Some people speak as if they’re offering you something. Others speak as if they’re bracing themselves. Some fill every gap, terrified of silence. Others trust the space between sentences and let you step into it with them.

This is why recordings of voices become so precious. Not because they are rare, but because they are specific. A photograph shows you what someone looked like at a point in time. A voice shows you how they moved through the world, their tempo, their warmth, their edges.

And when a voice is gone, it’s often what we miss most. Not the facts, not the stories as such, but the delivery. The familiar cadence. You can read someone’s words years later and still hear them saying it, exactly as they used to.

I was once asked what I would rather lose, sight or voice? For someone who is a photographer and a vocal presenter, that was not a question I could answer.

To lose your sight. Well, I can’t imagine not being able to see the sun rise, or the dew gently resting on a reed by the waterside on my favourite local canal walk.

To lose your voice, permanently. I’d feel I’d lost my identity.

That’s why sound, and voice in particular, feels so close to the core of who we are. It’s not edited. It happens in real time. Once spoken, it can’t be taken back. It reveals us before we’ve finished thinking.

And so to Jack.

“Hi, Dad,” he said. “You won’t need to give me a lift to school anymore.”

Sure, it was what he said that revealed the outcome of the driving test. But it was also the way he said it.

The Dad was said with the kind of intonation that could only be followed by good news. And Nandos for lunch.

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Hungerford Common is where our eldest, Jack, shed his bicycle stabilisers, aged somewhere between three and four, I’d guess.

There’s a reasonably long, hard, compacted gravel and smooth dirt track just off the winding road that passes over the common, with bollards just after a parking area, to prevent cars from driving too far along it, so it’s safe for cycling practice.

The only real obstacle, not that there were any this day, would be free grazing cattle that wander the common leaving ‘natural cones’ to weave around. There wouldn’t be a lot of weaving though on this mission. It’d be stabilisers off, pedal pedal pedal, let the wind flow through your locks and fly Jack fly.

And so it came to pass that day, he’d effectively seen off his balance learner plates and no longer needed two extra wheels to keep him steady, well, most of the time anyway.

The common was to become my playground for family portraiture during the first ten years of my photographic business. It has plenty of room for kids to run and run, a nearby railway to make the session a half-decent adventure for the youngens, and a pub within walking range for parents to celebrate the successful navigation of an hour spent making family memories.

I’m not a frequent visitor to the cattle-gridded common these days, but without fail, every time I do drive over it to hug the route of the Kennet and Avon canal from the south side, that stretch of path I see from the road is front and foremost in my mind, for its recollected family history that was a small but significant step in the history of someone marking freedoms.

Fourteen years later, and along somewhat more asphalt-covered roads, Jack is now, hopefully, about to remove the stabilisers from his next vehicle. This time, that safety net is not an additional set of wheels but his passenger-seated travelling chaperones, i.e., Sam, me, and the driving instructor. He’ll hopefully be able to cast aside the red L stickers on the bonnet and boot of his dark blue mini and become the family’s youngest driver to gain his licence, freedom to roam, and drive over the same common where he first cast off that set of bicycle stabilisers well over a decade ago.

I’ll level with ya, it’s 7-ish in the morning as I write these words, and you are, thank you in advance, the best catharsis a man could need. I’m nervous. I just want him to pass, and once I drop him at the test centre later on this morning, there’s nothing I can do to affect the outcome. I can only wait, hope and drink tea in the adjacent café to the test centre.

I can’t reach across and grab his saddle at the first sign of a wobble, I can’t shout “Go on Jack, you’ve got this,” at appropriate moments, though he’d probably swat me away for being an overenthusiastic dad if I did. All I can do is wait, hope and drink that tea.

I did muse that it might be funny to position myself along the route, if I knew which one they’d be taking, and hold up a placard with a message from his mum, who is equally as nervous as I am this morning. Can you imagine the trouble we’d be in?

‘Tea Neale, tea, best just drink tea.’

Freedom is such precious gift, and we take that, I suspect very much for granted, until the day someone takes your licence away for whatever reason.

When I first took my test &GF% years ago, it was in my instructor’s red Nissan Cherry, and I can’t say it went well. I’m stretching to remember his name. Colin, Terry, Trevor, it was one of those kinds of names, not a Dave or Mark, more the sort of name that comes with a clipboard. A name like Colin is a signed-up clipboard name.

Talk about nerves, though. That day as, let’s call him Colin, wished me luck and walked off to the 1984 equivalent of the café adjacent to the test centre I attended hoping his Nissan would return in one piece, I met with my examiner, let’s call him Mr. Burgess, a nod to the examining officer in a film called The Knowledge, for those who recall a movie about becoming a cabbie in London.

Mr Burgess wasn’t a character to be messed with in the film, which pretty much described his namesake’s demeanour at the driving test centre I attended.

Mr Burgess made it pretty obvious that his job was to keep the roads clear of young drivers who just weren’t up to the job. It was a personal policy that came with a look that said, “It’s unlikely you are walking out of this place with a pass today.”

I may not remember his name, but I do remember clearly what I felt like that day.

The test centre was positioned next and to the left of a large parking area, which was mainly taken up by heavy goods vehicles, and the reason I remember that detail clearly was because Mr. Burgess shouted ‘Stop’ loudly as I pulled out in front of an approaching articulated lorry, which I thought was turning left before it got to the test centre’s car park.

We’d only just begun, as the Carpenters once sang.

I swear blind he had his left indicator on, but in the ensuing years and a bottle or three of Château Neuf de Fallover 1976 vintage, I’d be making it up if I were to say he definitely did.

I stopped briskly.

Mr Burgess tested the seat belt nicely, and there followed the first dressing down, which no end of 76 vintage will have me forget.

“What do we never do when pulling out onto a main road?” he said in raised tones.

I’m not sure if ‘what do we never do,’ is entirely grammatically correct, is it?

I suspected I’d probably failed straight away, though I hoped Mr Burgess would forgive me, my first moment of nerves during the driving test.

“Sorry, sir,” was all I could really muster, thinking that sir might buy me some generous respect points. It worked at school, why not here?

And so we continued.

Mr Burgess had a habit of tutting. He’d tut, and then he’d write something down. You’d drive another street or two, and he’d tut again, possibly twice, and scurrilously write notes in an angry-sounding way.

He also sucked air in, every now and then, in that ‘Ooooh, you don’t want to do that’ kind of way.

When he wasn’t tutting or sucking air, he was practising the art of menacing silence. He made silence feel like a formal warning. He certainly didn’t do small talk.

I know that, because thinking I could talk my way down from the lorry mishap, he shushed me immediately.

“I think I would prefer you just drive and only talk if I ask you a question.”

And so followed 45 minutes or so of tutting, air sucking and angry scribbles.

Toward the end of the test and on the way back to the centre, we arrived at a roundabout, where Mr Burgess asked me to complete a 360-degree manoeuvre around it. Now, at this point, you’re going to look at me and say ‘You made that up, Neale,’ and I wouldn’t blame you in the least, but this is 1984, a time when we shared our provincial roads with those wonderful kitsch electric milk floats.

On the outside of the roundabout, a blue and white Express Dairies milk float was trundling around the road feature, hugging the curb stones for some reason. I waited for it to pass, then entered from the junction and positioned myself in the centre of the space, which allowed for two vehicles, he says, sounding like a copper’s report of a traffic accident.

The float was, as floats are, slow.

I passed it on my left.

Mr. Burgess tutted, then sucked more air in than a mechanic about to tell you, you have a family of gnomes living in your catalytic converter and it’s going to cost you your house to repair it.

“What do we never do on a roundabout?” asked Mr Burgess.

These days, many years older, and armed with the knowledge that when you’ve messed something up to a level you’re clearly not going to recover from, the only recourse is humour, I might have said something like, “Have a picnic?”

I’d overtaken a moving vehicle on a roundabout, and milk floats counted apparently. This did not look good.

We returned to the test centre.

I parked up, and Mr Burgess put crosses in boxes. I know that because of the double strokes he was making in his unnecessarily angry fashion.

“Well, that is the end of the test,” he remarked, “and I’m sure you won’t be surprised to learn that you haven’t passed.”

He seemed delighted. I was gutted.

My plans for the evening had been foiled, and Mr Burgess was, of course, with my seventeen-year-old’s rationale fully employed, completely at fault for placing a lorry in an awkward place at the start of the test, and a milk float challenge at the end, with a hundred tuts in between.

So, licence still imaginary, plans cancelled, pride bruised, that was that.

The way these things are written, we’ve shifted by a few hours, and I’m now sat in the café next to the test centre having just dropped Jack in for his test.

I didn’t see him leave the car park. I didn’t see his version of Mr Burgess. I have no idea what is currently happening as I sit nursing a pot of tea and a Bakewell slice.

The test started at 11.58, which seems rather a strange exact time to begin a test.

Surely noon would have been fine, wouldn’t it? Or do they say 11.58 so as to prevent someone getting 1200 hours confused and showing up to take a test at midnight?

I hope ‘Son of Burgess’ hasn’t taken up a role in this test centre, eighty or so miles from where I took my examination.

I’ve given Jack two bits of advice.

Don’t pull out in front of lorries, and avoid roundabout manoeuvres involving milk floats. A bit niche that one, seeing that I haven’t seen one on a road for three decades or so.

Freedom is a particular prize in our life isn’t it? And whilst you can clearly have that without needing to drive a car, there’s a definite privilege to starting your day in one place, and ending it several hundred miles north, east, south or west.

Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have a pot of tea to finish, and another twenty minutes to endure before our Jack calls me with the news.

I’ll get back to you tomorrow.

Today’s reflection was going to be something entirely different, but I turned left at the traffic lights, a nod to a message I received following the publication of a Substack piece that appeared in my Photowalk podcast feed, but 24 hours ago.

Pic: Ksenia Vasileva

Substack is a good place to post these pieces for various reasons.

One, it’s a platform I am going to embrace more in 2026 for all the reasons I mentioned in a reflection only a few days ago. Substack is a corner of social media-ville that seems to encourage reflection, reading and empathy. It’s not a shouty place that fosters discourse and temper, and looks for what might make you agitated in a clickbaity sense.

Two. I can post both the script and audio for the piece. It feels rounded that does.

Three. You can comment on the pieces you hear, and though it’s early early days, I hope it’s going to be a useful way to gauge what you like to hear, what stories land, what subjects pique interest and so on. It’s not necessarily a scientific way to do that, but it’s what I have.

Anyway, the whole point of referring to Substack is that the feature was published at 4.37am.

Which meant that the notifications went out en-modest-masse at 4.37am too.

I received a message from someone called Pete, who said, “You’re up early, or haven’t you gone to bed yet?”

I didn’t get the message until a reasonable hour, somewhere closer to 8 in the morning, and I replied straight away with, ‘it was timed to go out.’

“What, at 4.37, that’s very precise. It felt like a real person had pressed the button. What computer works to that sort of time?”

Good point, I thought. Good point.

4.37 does sound like a human intervention thing doesn’t it? Like I’d worked all night at the digital coal face and at 4.37 finally slumped across my long-suffering clattered keyboard, hitting the return key to publish on the way down.

Just as an aside, and maybe it’s a reflection for another day, the subby, Old Man Ron at the newspaper I spent a tiny bit of time at when I first left school, used to reckon he could read what he called angry copy.

“That journalist was bashing at his typewriter keys (AKA clattering), this piece is so angry! I can tell you know. Now go make me a cup of coffee, five sugars and a smile boy.”

Gawd knows what he’d have made of certain folk who send social messages out, all in caps early doors.

He was the last of a generation, I think. A man who sat in an ecosystem of a woodbine smoke cloud, wearing a scowl that said, “Don’t even think about questioning me.” In the office, he didn’t take prisoners; he’d say what he didn’t like, and to your face.

I’m not sure he’d have liked social media. Or maybe he’d have used it during the day to let off steam, instead of shouting at me whenever his coffee mug was dry.

If you ever met him off-site, though, away from his desk, he was sweetness, light and a stickler for getting home on time for his wife. During the day, his tie would be pulled loose as if to provide him more oxygen movement during his various tantrums, if you saw him walking down Maidenhead Street to his car, he’d stop to look in a window, to make sure he looked presentable for his wife.

Smoke and mirrors, that was old Ron.

As is, 4.37am as the release time for a Substack post, clearly.

It’s not the perfect ‘on the hour’, or ‘half past’, or even ‘a quarter’, no, it’s a random seven minutes after the half past, twenty-three before the hour, and computers don’t think that way, do they?

I’m not sure I’d have noticed 4.37, or if I did, found it piqued my curiosity. I’d have simply assumed there was some kind of delay, that it was programmed to find it’s way out at 4.30am UK time, but by the time the digital gremlins had huffed and puffed and aligned their ones and zeros, it departed late, like every other train in my county did the other day, because a couple of millimetres of snow had fallen.

But then there is the new-ish digital currency of humble bragging, let’s call a less subtle version of noticing 4.37am on the email clock.

And that, I think, is where smoke and mirrors have really taken up residence. Not in the timing of a post, so it might look slightly more human, the suggestion that someone has been burning the midnight oil, but in the stories we build in our own heads about other people’s lives, based on the smallest, shiniest fragments they choose to share.

You read about someone who seems to be doing extraordinarily well. The work is flowing. The projects are stacking up.

Oh, ding, here’s another announcement, another thank you, another moment of carefully worded gratitude. “I can’t quite believe this. Feeling very lucky. I have the best wife in the world.”

Really? Well, go tell ‘em then, with flowers, the kind that are real and have an aroma, rather than PNGs and GIFs.

It’s not necessarily boasting, I hope, but really, it can land somewhere uncomfortably close enough to make you stop and look twice.

And that’s when the comparison creeps in. You’re reading this while standing at the kettle waiting for it to boil, or sitting in the car before you go into the house, or scrolling in the coffee shop because you’ve convinced yourself this is staying in touch, that if you do a little people watching instead, you may be accused of being weird.

Their life in the posts looks busy, expansive, full of colour and momentum. Yours, by contrast, can feel smaller. Perhaps quieter, as if it hasn’t quite made the edit.

That’s the danger, I think. Not that other people are doing well, but that we start to believe we aren’t, simply because our own lives don’t come packaged with neat captions or regular applause.

It’s a bit like when people write on their feed, “I’m having a purge of people on this profile that I just haven’t spoken to. Sorry if you are one, but all the best.”

There follows a long thread of people who, for some reason, feel that being deleted from their list of friends could be the worst thing that could happen to their life, shy of Armageddon.

Might it be better if someone just wrote, “I’m feeling lonely today, I could certainly do with a nice chat with someone. DM me if you’re available to talk.”

The truth, which we all know if we pause long enough, is that we’re only ever looking at the shop window, and we’re not looking into the back room. We don’t see the worry about money, the tired conversations at the end of the day, the uncertainty that never quite leaves, even when things appear to be going well. We don’t see the pauses, the doubts, the weeks where nothing happens at all. Just the normal life thing.

Old Man Ron would have had a field day with this stuff. He had a radar for what was real and what was theatre, as I’ve hinted at. He used to say you could hear someone in the copy, yes, even though you were reading print. He’d sniff the air, take a drag on the 8th Woodbine of the morning, and tell you exactly where the anger or insecurity sat on a page.

He lived in smoke and mirrors himself, of course, as I’ve also hinted at. At work, he was formidable. Loud. Uncompromising. A man who made the room feel smaller just by sitting in it. Yet step outside the building and the performance dropped away. The scowl softened, and the tie straightened. He was keen to get home, keen to be seen a certain way by the person who mattered most.

That is contrast and a reminder that people are never just one thing.

Which brings me back to that 4.37am timestamp. It looked human, and it felt intentional. It suggested effort where there was, in reality, just a scheduling tool doing exactly what it was told. It said 4.37 because I set the time in the studio at 9.37pm, I changed the hour, but not the minutes. A small illusion if you will, harmless enough, but a reminder of how easily we fill in the gaps.

We’re very good at that, us humans. We see a fragment and build a whole story around it. We see someone else’s highlight and edit our own lives down to the dull bits.

But most lives aren’t dull; they’re just lived out of view. They happen in kitchens, on walks, in moments that never get shared, because they simply don’t need it. Responsibilities, routines, kindnesses, frustrations, and small acts of care don’t require broadcasting, really.

Maybe an interesting life doesn’t have to look interesting, and it certainly doesn’t need to be validated, timed, or applauded.

Old Man Ron would have snorted at the idea of any of that, I’m sure. He’d have told you that if you needed claps for doing your job, you were probably doing the wrong job, then sent you off for coffee with far too much sugar and a warning not to spill it.

And then, at six o’clock on the dot, he’d have gone home, straightening his tie in the Fosters Menswear window which was on the way to the car park, and lived the bit of his wonderful life that never once needed an audience.

Hear more Reflections podcasts on its new channel, Monday to Friday.

I touched on this recently, to an extent, but I’m coming back to it as I’ve just spent a dog walk listening to several YouTube channels talking about minimalism.

Pic: Sarah Dorweiler

It’s all very well this minimalist life and sounds attractive enough: wardrobes full of the same outfit so you don’t need to think about what to wear each day, a couch, a coffee table and one, at most two, magazines vying for attention next to a bowl of perfectly arranged citrus fruits.

Then there are the plain white walls and ceiling, painted with the same brand and eggshell finish. You can hardly see where the wall ends, and the ceiling starts.

There’s a modest bookshelf, though the books are arranged by colour and height, bought not for their literary interest, but for the bragging rights of having such organised shapes, sizes and colours.

This is not a house where you cast the car keys on any table top when you arrive back home at night after a long day arranging your workspace so it could win a Feng Shui employee of the month award, no, everything has a place, and there’s a place for everything, as my Gran used to say, I think.

Now I am being a little flippant I know, and I apologise to anyone who has started the year with a plan to declutter, perhaps a new year agreement, or resolution if you can bear the word to approach 2026 in far more organised fashion.

How’s that going by the way, the resolution?

I didn’t know of this, maybe you did, but the third Friday in January is officially known as Quitter’s Day. I'm mentioning it now in case I should forget to mention it then.

That’s the point when enthusiasm tends to wobble, the moment when good intentions collide with routine, tiredness, and the realisation that change asks more of us than simply that strong opening week.

It’s often described as the day when resolutions fall apart, not because the ideas were bad, but because the effort has stopped feeling new. Life creeps back in, habits push for their old seats, and the promise of a fresh start begins to feel harder to sustain than it did when the calendar first flipped.

Anyway, one of the podcasts I was listening to on YouTube suggested that you bin one thing a day for a year.

Now I don’t know about you, but being a creative bloke wot likes to collect stuff, I have an emotional connection wherever I look.

Take this sound studio.

Behind me, in the corner over my right shoulder there is a black Ikea bookshelf, with a dozen 12x12 cubby holes to store, in my case, books, records (records grandad?), magazines, a sort of installation which houses the typewriter I wrote all my letters to radio stations forty years ago, and in one, the finest Scottish whiskeys clients could afford when they thanked me for shooting their wedding.

At one stage, you could have done an optics run in this place, though twenty years of the odd tot or three and a bit of regifting of the ones I’m not so keen on, don’t tell me family, and it’s rather more modest now, and only needs one cubby hole.

“Start by choosing a place, or a shelf in one of your rooms,” said the minimalist in the film, and throw, or rehome one thing a day.

I reckon I could do that, I thought as I eyed this shelf having returned from my woof walk. Barney did not look convinced. For a dog, he has an enormous aptitude for showing me human-style disbelief.

I’ll start with the top of the shelving unit, because that’s the bit where nothing is packed neatly within a framed cubby hole. It’s just been plonked it some ways, artistically maybe, on the top of the bookcase.

I don’t know about you, but as creatives, I think that we attach meaning and stories to everything in a way that many others don’t. I’m not saying only we do that, but I don’t see my ‘non-creative’ friends giving half as much care to what can only be described as hoarding.

The top shelf beckoned. I scanned the stuff collecting dust, and my heart sank.

Every item had a story, and in my mind, it had a voice too, well, sort of.

First item. A Canon 5D, the original, which last year was gifted back to me by Natalie, who has worked with me on retouching pictures for fifteen years or so? I’d given it to Nat in 2010 or 11, so that she could enjoy the process of making pictures as well as editing them.

She’d given it back, probably because she saw that YouTube minimalist film and thought, “Ahhh, I know who’ll want this, because I can’t bring myself to bin it.”

That 5D was the first Canon camera I used professionally, and it travelled everywhere with me. That and an F2 35mm lens. It was a travel companion that had never let me down, and produced pictures with a creamy texture that has never been matched in subsequent versions or mirrorless options. I can’t get rid of that; that’s personal, that is.

Alright, it can stay.

Next, another camera, sitting on a dusty shoebox, a Zenit E. It was the first film SLR camera I owned, not this particular one granted, but still, it speaks of nostalgia, the pull of returning to film one day more fully, and it has that clinkety pechoooo noise that nothing else has managed to make. I can’t get rid of that; that’s personal, that is.

Alright, it can stay.

This one is strange. A small Airfix model of a DeHavilland Tiger Moth. My son Thomas made me that, because he knows it’s my favourite biplane, the one my Dad dreamed of flying in one day, and the aircraft Sam once bought me a very cold pleasure flight in one March. I loved it. I can’t get rid of that; that’s personal, that is.

Alright, it can stay.

It just went on and on. A pile of LIFE magazines, a wooden giraffe’s head with a funny grin that I use to place my broken shades on, that toured India with me last year, a microphone wind shield from Radio 1 that I purloined from Studio 4 when I left the BBC, don’t tell them, and a bottle of port of 1964 Taylor’s vintage port in a presentation box that a very good friend gifted me years ago, before we sadly lost contact.

This minimalism decluttering nonsense is hard.

Not just practically hard, but emotionally awkward in a way no YouTube video really prepares you for. Because none of the people calmly placing three neutral-toned items into a linen storage box ever stop to say, “Now imagine each of these objects once changed the direction of your life slightly.”

That’s the bit they skip.

For creatives, things are rarely just things. They’re receipts. Evidence. Props in a story that only really make sense to us. A camera isn’t a camera, it’s a passport to curiosity, my favourite phrase, you know that. A model plane isn’t a model plane; it’s a memory of someone thinking about you while the glue dried on the kitchen table. A battered notebook isn’t clutter; it’s a reminder that at some point you had an idea worth writing down, even if you never quite finished it.

So when someone says, “Just get rid of one thing a day,” what they’re really asking is, “Which version of yourself are you prepared to thank and then move on from?”

I stood there weighing up usefulness versus meaning, future need versus past value. Could I replace this?

Probably.

Would I remember why it mattered if I did?

Maybe not.

And that’s where my wobble starts.

Because the creative brain is wired for possibility. What if I need it for a project? What if it sparks something later? What if, in ten years’ time, I tell a story and realise the missing detail, like the inanely grinning wooden giraffe from TK Max, now I remember, was sitting right here all along before I got rid of it to feel organised?

Minimalism promises clarity. What it doesn’t mention is the low-level anxiety that comes from executing it.

In the end, I didn’t bin anything. Not the cameras. Not the plane. Not even the box the plane sits on, because boxes are useful and everyone knows that. Instead, I rearranged a few things, made the chaos look a bit more intentional, had a short sneezing fit from all the dust in the air I’d moved, and told myself I’d come back to it tomorrow.

Which is probably the truest version of decluttering I’m capable of.

I did, however, find a new mantra.

I can’t get rid of that; that’s personal, that is.

Alright, it can stay.

It may seem a strange way to begin a tribute to a photographic legend, but it was the first story that came to mind when I thought of Martin Parr, who has died aged 73.

My own tribute to Martin Parr, made during the Summer at a favourite café on the Kennet and Avon Canal. At the time I thought, “That’ll be my Martin Parr for the day then.”

I’ve been returning to this story I moot all evening, as I write, this being a Sunday evening. I’m thinking of the late great photojournalist Tom Stoddart in his home in the north east of England. I’d travelled to him to make a film about his life and work.

Tom’s walls seemed filled with black-and-white history. McCullin, colleagues, friends; powerful pictures of equally powerful moments. And then, right in the middle of all that grit and monochrome, a large, unapologetic framed colour print by Martin Parr. It was impossible not to ask why.

Years earlier, on an assignment, Tom brought home a very odd object, shall we say, found in a certain dictator’s bathroom, although please allow me to gloss over what exactly it was. Trust me, it’s something you’d never want to explain in airport customs.

Martin was a collector, Tom told me, not just of photobooks, which he’s famous for, but of war memorabilia, strange historical fragments. So Tom rang Martin and said, “I’ve got something I think you’ll want.”

Apparently, Martin didn’t hesitate. He told Tom he could choose anything from his archive. And that’s why a big Martin Parr colour print sat proudly in a house otherwise devoted to black and white. I liked this idea of two photographers finding the humour and curiosity in each other’s worlds, both photographically and physically.

News broke over the weekend that Martin Parr had died, and the loss will land heavily with the photographic community here, and in countries far and wide across this globe, I have no doubt. British photography feels as though a light has gone out, even if the work stays exactly where it is.

He was Martin Parr CBE, born 23 May 1952. A documentary photographer, photojournalist, collector of photobooks and, as I learned through Tom, collector of wartime odds and ends that most of us wouldn’t know what to do with. He spent his career pointing a camera at modern life with an extraordinary deadpan fascination.

Some called it satire, others anthropology, but whatever label you pinned on it, his pictures made you look twice at how we behave when we think nobody is watching. I can’t say I appreciated everything he did, but that’s both the subjectivity and glorious nature of art and photography.

He photographed England’s social classes, the wealth of the Western world, the holiday beaches, the cafes, the queues, the acts of vanity; he held them all up like postcards from a country I thought I understood far better.

I’d hoped to interview him last year. We even had a “yes” pencilled in. One of those nearly-there moments that kept slipping back in the diary. I wanted to ask about those early black-and-white pictures that are often overshadowed by the big, bright work. Even then, before the colour turned up the volume, you could see the same instinct at play. He was watching people, not judging them, just witnessing the theatre of everyday life.

His long association with Magnum brought his work into the international fold, though he always felt, to me, very much rooted in this patch of the world. He showed Britain to itself without coats of varnish. He didn’t wait for the flattering version, the Instagram influencer’s picture of life; he undoubtedly photographed the side of it and us, we so often crop out.

The exhibitions, the books, the archive that students will pore over for decades — is the bit that matters most. The reason any of us lifts a camera. He paid attention. He looked at small things, ordinary things, things most people walk straight past, and isn’t that a mantra I repeat often? I know that THAT’S what sticks with me today.

Most of us won’t leave behind a collection that rewires how a generation sees its own culture. We won’t publish shelves of photobooks or have our work debated in universities. But we can look. We can make pictures because something in front of us stirs something inside, even if we can’t explain it in the moment.

Martin Parr spent his life photographing the everyday and showing that it isn’t ordinary at all. That’s a legacy worth holding on to.

He used to say he was always chasing the gap between how a place likes to present itself and what it actually is. That line alone tells you everything about his eye. He’d make photographs that looked like fun at first glance, almost playful, then you’d realise there was more sitting alongside as a narrative.

The close-up way of working, the vibrancy, the flash that didn’t suck the authenticity out of a moment — you could look at one of his pictures and not know whether to grin or wince, which was precisely the point.

And then there was the Martin Parr Foundation in Bristol, which feels even more significant today, of course. He built it as a home for British and Irish documentary work — not just his own, but the photographs and stories he thought deserved to be kept safe, studied, argued over, and enjoyed. It was never a monument to himself.

It was a place that said, this matters, this work we do, this odd business of pointing cameras at real life. He backed emerging photographers, preserved archives that might otherwise have scattered to the wind, and turned the Foundation into an anchor for anyone trying to understand how we’ve documented this corner of the world. It’s hard to imagine our photographic landscape without it.

Over the past couple of years on this show, I have spoken to a number of photographers who credited Martin’s interest in their work as pivotal in their work and aspirations.

I’ve always winced slightly at the word obituary, it seems such a sullen word for lives lived, but I did look up that of Martin’s and found immediately The Guardian’s comforting words about this behemoth of British photographic legend.

I was amused to read that his editor Wendy Jones had suggested that Martin always looked like a naff birdwatcher, apologies to those who photograph birds, I’m sure it was in complete jest.

According to the piece, Martin Parr had an unremarkable early life, with family trips to the local sewage works where they enjoyed the local history, the views, and the occasional ice cream. Oh, but how he turned that ordinary into the extraordinary for the millions who followed and loved his work. The writing was on the wall from an early age, probably literally at that.

Charlotte Jansen’s piece in the Guardian, posted just after six on the evening following his death, catches a real truism about Martin Parr. It’s hard to contain a life like his in a single line, but I think this comes pretty close:

“A brilliantly human photographer, he celebrated the overlooked, finding beauty in cheese sandwiches at a church fete or people queuing for ice cream at the beach – all while poking fun at Britishness.”

I think that is perfect, Charlotte, just perfect.

I don’t know why I thought of this, call it an inquisitive mind that wanders off in all directions like a photographer with bucket and spadefuls of curiosity on New Brighton Beach, but I wondered what a song at his funeral might sound like when it comes to paying tribute and there seems to be only one, a Monty Python classic, where you’re invited to always look on the bright side of life.

“How much?” is usually the question I most fear, if fear is not too strong a word, for something so benign as being asked a simple question about your business offering by a prospective customer, at an event perfectly cued up for prospects and sales, I might add.

Let’s talk about wedding fairs.

Pic: Neale James

If you’re married, unless you have a son, daughter, or friend about to suggest you tour a set number of wedding venues in search of the perfect location for their nuptials, this may not be of interest.

If you have no intention to place a ring upon a finger, yours, your partner’s or otherwise, then this piece may not be of interest.

If you’re a photographer but can’t imagine ever shooting a wedding because a… the stress seems a stretch too far for your nervous shutter finger to consider or b… the idea of photographing in this much maligned genre of picture making makes you run for the kind of cover you’d hope would stand firm in Armageddon, well now, this Reflection may not be of interest.

Having given you three ifs, though, let me introduce three buts, if you’ll pardon the expression.

But, I think you’ll be intrigued by the cautionary tale of a photographic mishap I’m about to reveal.

But, in terms of people, their stories and observations, these events are rich with human moments to devour.

But, and talking of devouring, there’s usually food. If for no other reason, go for the food, the brisket, or hot bowls of chilli, the array of wood-fired pizzas, chef special stir fries, all washed down with a cocktail or mocktail of your choice and a doughnut. There’s always a doughnut, and I should know; this time, my stand was next to the doughnut vendor, not a great place to be if you’re trying to avoid sugar.

Wearing my wedding photography hat for a moment, I’d like to share the story of my weekend. One wedding and one funeral, as it goes, both planning events, and three weddings shy of a box office smash.

I’ve attended wedding fairs pretty much since day dot of promoting my professional photography services, and in that time, they haven’t really changed too much.

Sure, there are seemingly more wedding photographers and now content creators as competition, and the kit has changed dramatically, with cameras able to practically see in the dark these days, but the events are reasonably similar to how they were in 2005/6.

The idea is very simple. You set up a table, pop your wares on it, some emotionally charged frames, lit for pizzazz if need be, alongside promotional material and bowls of boiled sweets, and wait for couples or customers to ask you questions.

As a photographer, the questions are along the lines of:

“How many photos will I get?”

“Do people bother with wedding albums anymore?”

“Is it just you or do you have a second shooter?”

“Can you do video too?”

“Have you worked at this venue?”

“Do you fly drones?”

“Will you travel?

“How long are you there for?”

And a reasonably new one, “Do you offer services and blue-light discount?”

Oh, not forgetting, “Do you shoot in colour too?” This is a reaction to four pages of black-and-white pictures in a row in a show album.

In true ‘Just one more thing’ Columbo style, “How much?”

Then there are statements, reactions to the pictures you have curated that demonstrate your style and approach.

“I love these, they’re just the sort of thing I’m after.”

“Ah, I hope my partner looks as emotional in our pictures.”

“These are all very natural, I love natural.”

Sometimes that latter one morphs into, “I hate having my photo taken.”

I once did a dentist’s wedding, and we got talking later during the day, by which time I’d worked out, or at least suggested to him, that our lives were very similar.

Obviously, I don’t spend hours prodding around in my customers’ mouths with sharp instruments or sizing them up for retainers, but quite often the first word uttered when discussing our mutual services contains the word “hate.”

For me, “I hate photos” is a commonly repeated mantra, not so much in terms of the idea of a picture, but more for appearing in one, and for a dentist, it’s used within many a declaration made by a client when they’re invited to sit in the reclining chair. “I hate being here.”

There was a brilliant after-dinner speech many moons ago that I had on a cassette, I think, by a dentist, a talk called, “This is going to hurt you more than me.” Along with David Gunsten’s brilliant ‘What goes up must come down,’ after-dinner speech about the life of an air traffic controller, it’s amazing what you can entertain business professionals with, after one hundred plates of chicken, accompanied by last year’s finest Châteauneuf-du-fallover. My own one is in the writing, always, called “The wrong shade of pink,” following a very swanky do in a top London hotel, where my couple refused to cut the cake because the pink wasn’t in step with the floral tone.

I’m digressing now, so steering back on course, let me share two stories.

The first story I have is a lovely one from a prospective groom who surely receives the coveted Proposal of the Year award for his New York one a month or so back.

There’s a rooftop restaurant overlooking Times Square, which he’d booked for a romantic lunch with his soon-to-be fiancée. I didn’t know about that restaurant, and I didn’t know you can rent the big neon signs Times Square is famous for, to deliver personal messages. You block-book a minute of time once in an hour, and your message will appear at that junction for, I think he said, two or three hours. He’d booked twenty-three minutes past the hour. All he had to do, which he successfully accomplished, was have his partner look over Times Square toward the particular neon sign and bingo, surprise!

I know not everyone goes for such public displays of affection, but I rather liked that.

The next story is my cautionary tale.

I’m really not sure if I should share their real names, but here is the picture in question.

The couple I spoke with were enjoying a holiday in Mombasa, Kenya.

Quick travel agent moment. Mombasa has been welcoming curious wanderers for centuries, ever since traders, sailors and the simply lost washed up on its shores. I’ve been there, a long time back, and I can honestly say it would be a great place for street photography, ever the travel photographer.

If you have in your life had reason to propose marriage, you’ll know this, or at least I think you’ll share this feeling, that carrying a ring around and planning just the right moment is a weighty responsibility. It’s hard to hide the fact this is on your mind, and if you’re not careful, you’ll blow the surprise way before you get to it, by the fact you spend twenty-four hours leading up to the moment acting plain weird.

I’m sure airport security staff must savour this moment. They see the ring within its ring box hidden at the bottom of a sneaker, secured from the naked eye but not x-ray by a well-stuffed gym sock.

“Who has the back Adidas bag, please?” they say, as they scour the row of travellers just coming through the ‘standy-up-arms-spread-wide’ personal x-ray machine.

They’ll have their fun and watch him or her perspire as the search of their bag moves toward the surprise, which is the sneaker.

“All seems in order,” they say as they brush the shoe, “have a nice trip,” said with a wink.

Look out for those winks if you’re expecting or hoping for a proposal.

Anyway, back in Mombasa, our groom-to-be was winding up for the big moment, and he’d organised at the last moment, someone in the outdoor restaurant to photograph this big life moment. Three moments, same sentence, apologies.

He goes down on one knee, and his fiancée is standing. You can see by the photograph that dinner is still to be served; I don’t blame him for not waiting. You can’t enjoy lobster thermiwotsit knowing that this moment is yet to be served.

Steadied on one knee, he produces the ring. A beautiful moment. A moment you want captured cleanly, lovingly, in focus. A moment that demands a photographer who knows timing, angles, anticipation, and when not to stand behind a fern.

Click.

The waiter takes the photograph with the earnest energy of someone who believes pressing the button is the entire job. And he does capture it. Technically. The trouble is, he manages to position himself in such a way that the groom’s face is completely obliterated by a giant leaf from a potted plant. As for the bride-to-be, she’s turned at an angle that could belong to any human woman on Earth. It’s less “will you marry me?” and more “guess who these people are?”

Now, you wouldn’t hire me to cook a soufflé unless you actively enjoy disappointment. I know my limits. A soufflé is not a place to experiment. It is a place for skill, precision, and someone who understands the stakes. A proposal photograph is no different. High emotion, one chance, and no opportunity for reshoots unless you’re willing to fake the whole thing later on a beach with props.

This is the rather honest truth of it, and with their permission, I might like to share this at future wedding fairs, it’s not as if you’ll recognise them. When a moment matters, you don’t hand it to the nearest well-meaning bystander, no matter how friendly they are or how confidently they hold your phone. Lovely as they may be, they’re not trained for the pressure, the timing, or the responsibility of turning life’s big chapters into memories that last.

And that’s why professionals exist. Not because the rest of us aren’t capable in our own fields, but because some moments deserve more than a hopeful guess from someone juggling cutlery and table numbers.

So my sincerest of thanks to the couple I spoke with, who were fabulous, and he is about to embark, I think, on a podcast adventure himself.

They did actually say that this picture is a story they still laugh at. And it is, I mean, I’m sharing their tale now as it goes.

What did I say about wedding fairs?

There’s always a story.

And there’s always a doughnut. In this case, I’m sorry to say, the person holding the smartphone at that moment.

I’m sure the soufflé, followed by the lobster, was good, though?

And it all ended in a yes, which is what my business is all about.

I’ve been thinking about whether to record this one for a week or so, for all kinds of reasons, but best foot forward, I’m committing this to tape, to talk in analogue terms.

I hadn’t heard the phrase, toxic voyeurism until a couple of weeks ago. It landed on my mental “new things to understand” list, driving to London listening to a radio phone-in where the host, aided by callers, was talking about the strange pull of watching other people’s lives unravel.

Pic: Jurien Huggins

The topic was cast on the back of the case of a young Polish woman who built a following of more than a million by insisting she was Madeleine McCann.

We have an international audience to this show, so, for those who may not be au fait with the case, Madeleine McCann was the young girl, aged three at the time, who disappeared from a holiday apartment in Praia da Luz, Portugal, in 2007 while her parents were eating at a nearby restaurant.

Despite one of the most extensive missing-child investigations in modern history, no confirmed trace of her has ever been found. Over the years, the case has drawn intense public attention. Speculation and conspiracy theories have not made it any easier for the family, and, consequently, parents Kate and Gerry, a respected GP and consultant cardiologist, respectively, have been left without answers, and the world has watched them live in that uncertainty ever since.

In many respects, this is a sadly perfect modern example of toxic voyeurism, a moment where the public gaze lingered not out of malice, but because people were unable to look away from a story defined by fear, mystery, and, of course, heartbreak.

The attention wasn’t driven solely by understanding or empathy; it was also shaped by that uncomfortable pull to witness a situation no parent should ever face, a pull that, years later, would resurface whenever someone online tried to attach themselves to the case for attention. I reference the Polish Instagrammer who claimed she was Madeline and built off the back of this wildly unfathomable claim, her mammoth audience.

It seemed to me that geography and nationality may have put this claim out to pasture somewhat more quickly than it did.

It’s been suggested that much of that following could well have been in place, simply to witness the unravelling of her life and mental state, once DNA testing, which was inevitable, proved her claim to be false, manipulative and ultimately cruel.

The attention didn’t grow because the claim was convincing; it grew because people were waiting for the moment it collapsed. The spectacle became the story. And somewhere in the middle of that discussion, the presenter used this term I’d never properly considered before: toxic voyeurism.

It’s a heavy pairing of ideas or words, but the more I listened, captive in terms of my journey and captivated in terms of the concept of such a thing, the more I thought it threaded through our cultural history and certainly some of the subjects we discuss on the show when it comes to talking about social media.

And it’s not just a commentary about the worst side of social media; it was a commentary about the human condition.

What do I mean by that? Well, if you go far enough back through the timeline of history, you find crowds gathering for all kinds of reasons that make today’s doom scrolling look almost tame.

Public hangings, for instance. Not hidden away, not quiet affairs. They were advertised. People brought picnics. Children stood on tiptoes. Newspapers printed timetables. And if you go earlier still, the Romans perfected the art of turning punishment into performance. The Colosseum wasn’t simply a stadium; it was an entire industry built around drawing people in to witness brutality presented as entertainment. Before that, crucifixion was designed to be a spectacle. It wasn’t just about ending a life; it was about making sure others watched it happen.

If you keep pulling on that thread, you realise something uncomfortable. This impulse to gather, to observe, to slow down at the roadside, is ancient.

Long before smartphones, click counters, and outrage-shaped headlines, humans leaned in to look at things that frightened or unsettled them. Part curiosity, part fear, part reassurance that it’s them, not us. And as grim as that sounds, it’s part of our wiring.

I learned from this phone-in that we’re drawn to the things that unsettle us because they teach us where the edges are, though it seems a rather desperate way to learn, doesn’t it?

The difference now is scale. A crowd used to be a few hundred people in a square. Now it’s millions of eyes, all arriving through the same glowing doorway in our hands, that bloody smartphone, the thing we have a twisted relationship and arrangement with at times.

And the pace has changed. The Colosseum had to be swept after an event. TikTok doesn’t need a broom. Stories repeat, loop, multiply. Before we’ve finished forming a thought, we’re nudged toward another clip, another twist, another shock.

So if this impulse is centuries old, then the goal isn’t to outrun it or pretend we’re too sophisticated to fall for it. Doom scrolling is nothing new kids, we didn’t invent it. The modern version, maybe, but certainly not the concept.

Look, I don’t want to preach about how we avoid it, we’re both big and I’m certainly ugly enough to know what’s right and wrong in this discussion.

My reason for mentioning it was more for the interest of the fact it’s a recognised thing.

I know I have moments before I click something I just know isn’t going to make me feel better. I am not for one moment claiming that I make only right decisions here.

Social media can do extraordinary things. It connects people who might never meet. It gives a voice to those who’ve been unheard for too long. It can teach, inspire, comfort, amuse, and sometimes genuinely change a life. But side by side with all that good sits the appetite for spectacle, and the platforms know this. Outrage is sticky. Fear holds attention. Shock is quick currency. The algorithms don’t make us watch difficult things; they just notice when we do, and then they assume we want more.

It seems to me that understanding that pattern is half the battle. It turns the screen into something you’re driving rather than something that’s dragging you. You start choosing what you want to fill your mind with instead of letting the feed decide for you. And in that choice, the toxic part of voyeurism loses its grip with any luck.

I’ve been trying to train social media to show me more of what I actually want, and it’s helping. But I’ve also noticed this: if I click on anything even slightly click-baity or sensational, the algorithm reacts instantly, and what comes back has nothing to do with the steadier stuff I usually look for. It jumps the queue and shows up as if I’d personally requested a full parade of it.

But this observation or reflection isn’t about taking a moral high ground. It’s as simple as noticing when a story begins to shape our mood. If you’re halfway through a scrolling session and suddenly everything feels a bit heavier, that’s the sign. Close it. Step away. Not forever, not dramatically, just long enough to reset.

I can’t turn the clock back to an age before spectacle. I probably wouldn’t want to. But I can be thoughtful about the attention I give away, because attention is much more powerful than it used to be. It can fuel storms, stir up strangers, flatten someone’s reputation in an afternoon, or convince you that you have one. But it can also lift people up in ways the Romans could never have imagined.

I don’t think toxic voyeurism is about the screen itself. It’s that old instinct meeting modern speed.

So if I’m going to navigate it with any kind of grace, maybe the goal isn’t to look away entirely, but to look with awareness. To recognise when a story is becoming something I’m feeding rather than understanding.

In perhaps an obvious way, acknowledging the history helps. It reminds me that this is an ancient human itch. It also reminds me that people have always learned to manage it. Crowds left the gallows. Audiences drifted out of the Colosseum. There’s a choice woven into all of this. And on the days when the world feels particularly loud, and that seems rather a lot with the news right now, that choice is still there, even if it’s just the decision to put the phone down and walk outside.

Or take a photograph. Or listen to something gentler than a stranger’s crisis.

The spectacle will still be there when I return, but I’ll come back to it with a steadier mind. That, more than anything, is the difference between being dragged by the noise and moving through it on my own terms.

I didn’t see it, when I took the picture. It was one of those fleeting moments on the London Underground, camera in hand, searching for a face that might break the rhythm of the crowd. A lone character among those waiting for trains.

A poster on the wall ahead of me caught the hum of the platform light just right, and for a heartbeat, the ordinary scene was worth making a picture of.

A man stood facing an advertising hoarding, who turned to show his profile, just at the right moment. The colour and composition lined up just right. So I raised the camera, made the frame, and caught the next train alongside him.

It wasn’t until now, two years and one month later, reviewing some images made for my 365 project, that I noticed what I’d really photographed.

There it was, in bold type: “BREAKING NEWS IS BROKEN”. And beneath it, the line: “Try the world’s first slow journalism magazine, Delayed Gratification”.

Now there is irony. Here I was, a photographer trying to think quickly in a reasonably fast-moving place, missing the message right in front of me about slowing down. There’s a nudge from the photograph itself, whispering to me, nay shouting, “Delayed Gratification”.

Delayed Gratification, as it turns out, is a real publication, a quarterly magazine that tells the news in reverse.

“How does that work then, Neale?”

Well, three months after the headlines have faded, this quarterly revisits them with distance and reflection, reporting not on the noise of the instant moment, but on the meaning. It’s journalism that values hindsight over hot takes, depth over immediacy.

I was musing on how that might work, say, for social media? You post, or at least upload, but then you get a form of thinking time. The picture won’t appear for the next three months, and in that time, you can rewrite your thoughts and reflect on the purpose behind posting it in the first place.

Delayed gratification. It’s an idea that feels almost radical in an age of constant refresh, isn’t it? No breaking news. No panic. Considered journalism when we’ve all had time to breathe the story in.

Perhaps that’s why this photograph above, this fleeting discovery, resonates so much. Because photography, I think, has its own kind of slow journalism. You record something in an instant, but the real importance, story, or significance only unfolds over time. You see the photograph later and realise that there’s something much more relevant than you thought at the time of making it.

When I first pressed the shutter on this platform scene, I thought I was making a simple picture: a man looking down a platform waiting for a train, with a wall of colour beyond him. Not necessarily a big shot, not necessarily clever. But when I came back to it, the photograph became a “reminder to self”, as I like to say, that the world doesn’t always reveal itself immediately. Meaning takes its time.

In that sense, the picture and the magazine share a philosophy: to resist the urge to react and instead, to reflect.

It’s like that old order, isn’t it, where letters took days to arrive, and then your response took days more. By the time you’d both thought of composition and response, it could be a week or two more likely, and that’s only a first pass, as it were.

Every issue of Delayed Gratification rewinds the clock, asking readers to pause and reconsider what really happened, not the first-day noise, but the truths that surface once emotions cool and context returns. In photography, we do something similar. We freeze a moment, not to race it into the feed, but to hold it long enough to understand it later.

And that’s the beauty of a 365 project, too; it’s built on delay. You don’t always see the story of a day until you look back at the year. You realise that the real gratification comes not from the daily act of posting or sharing, but from the collection that grows over time, from the patience of seeing and revisiting.

Maybe the man in the photo was just killing time, waiting for the same train I was. Or perhaps, like me, he saw something that made him stop and inspect further. Either way, that pause, that act of looking, now feels more valuable than it did in the moment, if only just a little bit.

In the end, delayed gratification isn’t just a catchy title for a magazine. It’s a way of seeing, and I like that. The thought that a photograph, or a headline, or a day, can still be waiting to tell you something long after you’ve moved on.

Surely, that’s the real gift of both photography and slow journalism. They ask you to stop being first and start being present. To accept that the story doesn’t end at the moment it’s captured, it simply begins there.

And so, this picture of a man looking at a wall of posters, then back along the platform, a scene that feels so ordinary, has become a small study in patience. A lesson in seeing more slowly.

A reminder that the best things we make, and the truest things we notice, often arrive, fittingly, on or in delay.

There’s a sound that every household knows. A sort of muffled call that starts with, “help…” but it’s so faint that you’re not sure whether to take it seriously or just finish making a cup of tea. That was the sound I heard last Monday when Sam decided to decorate our youngest’s room.

He’d asked for a plain white wall, the kind of clinical white that makes you think of a newly opened gallery, I suppose. Now I like a good expansive gallery with colourful canvases hung on pristine white walls, though I wasn’t entirely sure of it for this installation. But it was his room, his canvas.

Sam was up on a little stool, brush in hand painting merrily enough and occasionally coming down for a sip of coffee, apparently, only this time, when she came down, it wasn’t onto the wooden floorboards, and wasn’t on to the stool again, but directly into the open pot of matt white paint.

Honestly, if you tried to do this 100 more times, you probably wouldn’t be able to repeat it so accurately even once more. Really, what should have happened is that the paint pot was tipped, and the floor became as white as the wall.

But no, her very trendy decorating croc went in perfectly, like she’d been aiming for it.

She called out, not too loudly—you don’t want to alert passers-by with an emergency cry for help when it’s really just that you’ve sunk a shoe in Dulux.

But eventually a much louder frustrated help did just enough to have me bring a bucket of water, so she could go paint, to bucket. Some cloths were sacrificed in the cleanup, and dignity partially restored.

Now if I did that, they’d still be talking about it for months. “Do you remember that time when Dad,” which starts many a story. At least this might have replaced chip gate, which is a story for another time.

Seeing Sam’s foot in a pot of white paint did however remind me of a photographic moment from years ago, back when we had a studio out on the farm.

We used to do portrait sessions and product photography, for a brand that specialised in clothes for the larger gent. A strong though unofficial contract at the time, as they were really starting to embrace online sales.

One of the regular studio jobs that had to be completed before every visit from them, was to paint the studio floor. It had to be, like my youngest’s room, pristine white, though we used a hard-wearing studio floor paint, not exactly the cheapest and slow to dry as it happens too.

We had a studio and an edit and meeting room, separated by a fairly decent wall and door, relevant for the story to come.

In the studio, I’d constructed an infinity cove, very home-made, but I was proud of it, actually.

Friends of ours had asked if their daughter could come and do some work experience, since at the time, I think she was considering a life as a photographer.

So, Courtney, who I think now runs her own entrepreneurial business in something entirely unrelated, joined us for a couple of weeks.

On her first day, eager to impress, we gave her the task of repainting the important infinity cove, which was needed for these regular commercial commitments with our biggest spender.

So picture our modestly giant white cyclorama: walls that curve into the floor with no visible edge, so when you photograph someone, it looks as if they’re standing in endless space. It’s one of those things that relies on a perfect, bright white.

Now, the rule when painting an infinity cove is simple. You start at the back, right at the curve where the wall meets the floor, and you work your way carefully outwards toward where the cameras sit.

That way, when you finish, you can step neatly away, no footprints, no mess.

But, Courtney hadn’t really thought of that when she keenly started to paint. While we were next door editing, she started the other way round—at the front—painting herself backwards into the cove until she was marooned in an island of wet white slow-drying paint.

Help? She called. As quietly as Sam, I think at first. I sense moderate embarrassment.

The calls became ever louder, and the decent studio door could no longer hide her exasperation.

By the time we came through, she was standing there, brush in hand, wide-eyed, surrounded by this gleaming, pristine sea of fresh paint. No way forward, no way back.

So, we did eventually rescue her, with a combination of laughter and improvised stepping stones, but that image has stayed with me.

And perhaps that’s the metaphor here. We still paint ourselves into corners. Sometimes at work, sometimes in relationships, sometimes with the decisions we make without thinking through the exit plan. In Courtney’s case, it was just paint. In life, it can be something bigger: a commitment we weren’t ready for, a project that grew far beyond our capacity, a silence we left too long to break. I can think of a brace of those silences in my own life, right now.

But here’s the thing: paint dries. Even when you feel stuck, time moves on, opportunities change, and eventually, there’s a way to move again. You may get there with a little help, or with a bucket of water and some old cloths, or just with the patience to wait until things are safe to step on.

So maybe the lesson is this: when you do paint yourself into a corner—and sooner or later, all of us will—don’t panic. Don’t stamp through the mess. Look for a smarter way out. And if all else fails, laugh, because one day, you’ll be writing a Reflection about it.

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Photographs from our Scottish Photowalk retreat

With only a few weeks to go until the podcast retreats to Scotland, I have one space over the two weeks we’re hosting this special date in the Photowalk show diary. Sometimes I know folk think, “Hang about, I actually have some time free, and gawd, do I need some time away doing what I love with like-minded people,’ and so I thought I’d mention it here: those last-minute adventures can be so powerful! This is the final time for a few years, at least, we’re hosting the retreat in its current form, as next year we’ll be travelling to Mongolia in September. Here are a few thoughts about this special time spent together.

The road down to Loch Maree

The Friday Photowalk has always been more than a podcast; it’s a safe, thought-empowering community where stories, ideas, and creative energy are shared without judgment. Here, photography isn’t just a swipe and a like; it’s about connection, with each other, and with the world we frame through our lenses. This September, we’ll gather on Scotland’s Black Isle, near Inverness, staying on a working soft-fruit farm surrounded by some of the most beautiful historic landscapes in the Highlands. It’s our annual pilgrimage, a week to escape the noise, embrace the land, and recharge creatively.

Monday: We meet up with our darkroom guru, Matt Sillars, as we prepare for a Welcome Nature Walk, photographing with film cameras (supplied), to make an art print the following day.

Following lunch, we travel to Black Water Falls, a location in the Highlands, to make photographs. We’ll walk and spend time together photographing the beautiful scenery we’re blessed to be spending time in this week. Lochs, mountains, rivers and waterfalls all within reach of our lens.

Tuesday: We spend a day in the Inverness darkroom, producing a classic black and white art print from our nature photo walk the previous day. Whether you have processed and printed this way or not, by the afternoon you will have enjoyed the experience of seeing your work come alive under a red light. It’s a rewarding day for all those attending and come the evening you’ll be ready for a Scottish supper.

Wednesday: Photography is a way of sharing our wonder for the world pictorially and emotionally, though articulating our experiences as short stories, prose, poems, or curated thoughts for social media is a skill seldom discussed in photographic circles. In the morning, we’ll be joined by author Merryn Glover, who writes fiction, drama, poetry and non-fiction, with work widely published and broadcast on the BBC.

Thursday: As presenter and producer of The Photowalk podcast, I’d like to help you find the sound of your pictures. Working in radio and sound for 35 years, two decades alongside my work as a professional photographer, sound continues to be a pivotal part of my creative toolbox when creating and telling my photographic stories. I’ll be helping you to create a new storytelling skill combining stills and sound. I’ll also be adding in the idea of collating your thoughts as Reflections, the new popular short stories and journaling feature on the show.

Friday: The Photowalk Retreat is an opportunity to enjoy time with like-minded friends and occasionally alone with your thoughts in the glens. We'll make pictures, talk about photography enveloped by and in the beautiful scenery we're blessed to be only a short drive away from, on our Black Isle base. The fifth day of the retreat is a day of relaxed photowalking, with a visit to Loch an Eilein in the Rothiemurchus Forest near Aviemore, before returning to our base for a farewell dinner where we'll share our favourite photographs of the week.

If this sounds like the adventure you need to recharge your creativity, then the Scottish Photowalk Retreat 2025 is waiting to welcome you.

For all information about booking and price: https://www.thejourneybeyond.uk/scotland-25

During July, I plan to release one edition, Monday through Thursday, on our Patreon, with Friday's edition being part of The Extra Mile show. A handful of editions will be repeated here on the Photowalk Substack.

Memory

On a recent photowalk, I met Mary and her husband, David. Mary lives with early-onset dementia and attends a Nature Memories Café, a place designed to spark connection and creativity through gentle, nature-based activity. We talked not just about memory loss, but about the memories that remain, and how a photograph might hold more than just nostalgia. I wrote this upon my return home from that meeting.

Photograph by Lynn Fraser: Mongolian eagle hunter

I am beyond excited to announce the launch of a NEW travel venture, The Journey Beyond, which I have co-founded with my good friend and photographer, Lynn Fraser.

Lynn is a Scottish Highlands–based photographer and writer whose work focuses on human connections. Her travels through India, Mongolia, China, and numerous places in Africa, as well as beyond, inspire the Substack series, "My Journey with a Camera," where she shares photographic stories through words and stunning images.

We believe the most powerful journeys don’t come from ticking off sights, but from seeing with wonder, for those drawn not just to the view, but to what’s unfolding behind it, beyond the beach, beneath the surface.

There’s something that happens when you pick up a camera in a place you don’t know. You begin to look with more intention. The unfamiliar strips away the autopilot we so often walk with. Suddenly, you’re noticing everything: the light, the gestures, the textures, the quiet interactions that would otherwise pass unseen.

Photograph by co-guide Shivam Pandey in Kolkata

Photography, in these moments, becomes more than a creative act. It becomes a way of connecting, not just with the world, but with yourself. When you travel with a camera, you’re not just sightseeing. You’re searching. You’re pausing. You’re making space to notice, and in that, there’s something deeply grounding.

For me, taking a camera to unfamiliar places gives structure to the experience. It helps me focus, notice more, and take things in at a slower pace. In a world that often demands speed and distraction, that kind of attention feels valuable.

Photography by Neale James: made in 2025 at Delhi Junction

That’s the spirit behind what we’re building, a way to travel with purpose, to see more clearly, and to remember that sometimes, the most important journeys are the ones that bring you back to yourself.

We begin with two new, fabulous adventures, supported by The Photowalk podcast, my established channel for stories of image-making, discovery, and human connection. This time, we step further afield with a camera in hand, as our new travel venture invites you to explore the world slowly, curiously, and with creative purpose.

Adventure 1 is for a small-group photography adventure through Kolkata and Varanasi, a slow, immersive nine-day journey designed for photographers of all levels who want more than sightseeing: time to create meaningful images, explore vibrant culture with local insight, and deepen their storytelling through expert guidance and real connection.

Photography by co-guide Shivam Pandey in Varanasi

Adventure 2. Join us for a 15-day photographic odyssey through Mongolia, a country of vast horizons, ancient rhythms, and quiet resilience. From the incense-swirled monasteries of Ulaanbaatar to the golden stillness of the Altai mountains, this journey takes you deep into the heart of the steppe and beyond, a land where time slows and the sky stretches endlessly.

Photograph by Lynn Fraser: Mongolian eagle hunter

You’ll live alongside nomadic families, eagle hunters, and camel herders, experiencing daily life in gers, rising with the sun, and photographing stories that can’t be found in guidebooks. Whether you’re walking through thyme-scented temple ruins, sipping fermented mare’s milk beneath a sky full of stars, or watching an eagle take flight across the highlands, this is more than a tour, it’s a rare chance to travel slowly, see deeply, and reconnect with the raw beauty of the world through your lens.

Our travels seek a different kind of richness: one of conversation, connection, and craft. Whether you come with a camera, a journal, or simply an open heart, you’ll return with more than souvenirs. You’ll return with stories, layered, vivid, and entirely your own.

This is The Journey Beyond. Travel with curiosity. Go gently. Come back changed.